With all the hullabaloo (is there even a right way to spell that?) around the Kindle 2 being launched today, I got curious as to whether my Kindle 1 would be receiving the same benefits as the new version. Looks like it should, actually, although I upgraded and don’t notice much surface difference (except that it screwed up the ordering of books).
Edit: This firmware upgrade definitely does not give the Kindle1 the same feature set as the Kindle2, but it does add a few things. For more details, see Amazon’s page.
Since I read a decent number of programming books, the new features that is most noteworthy is that your Kindle 1 will now support monospaced fonts, which makes reading code far easier.
I couldn’t very easily find instructions on how to update the Kindle 1’s firmware, but found a link to Amazon buried somewhere down in a MobileRead forums post. The easiest way to update the firmware is basically to put your Kindle into sleep (or screensaver, whatever) state, and make sure wireless is on. I did this, and when I woke up this morning, I was at version 1.20 (the freshest version).
If you don’t have good WhisperNet service, or you prefer to update manually, Amazon’s info is here, but I’ll paste the good stuff:
To manually install the Kindle software update:
- Visit Amazon.com and make sure you’re logged into the Amazon.com account to which your Kindle is registered. The download will not be available if you are not logged in before attempting step 2.
- Visit www.amazon.com/update_kindle.bin to download the Kindle software update file.
- Set your Kindle power switch to the “ON” position.
- Connect Kindle to your computer using the included USB cable.
- Use your computer’s file browser to copy the file “Update_kindle_1.2.bin” from your computer to Kindle’s root directory or the SD card. Do not place the file into one of Kindle’s folders.
- Check the USB activity indicator on the Kindle cursor bar. When the silver cursor stops flashing, the file transfer is complete and you can safely disconnect Kindle from your computer.
- Use your computer to unmount or eject your Kindle and disconnect the USB cable from Kindle and your computer.
- Press the Home key and then select “Settings” from the Home menu.
- From Settings screen, select “Update Your Kindle”. Please note that this menu option will be grayed out if the most recent update has already been installed.
- Select “Ok” when prompted if you want to perform an update.






